Ian Aleksander Adams

I’ve seen Hannah’s work around a fair bit, but the edits and singular images people feature often present her work in a very different way than I would. This is my bias: a lot of her work is hip and sexy, but that’s not what interests me about it (or about photographs in general.) I decided I had to do my own small feature.

I think the idea of presenting her images in sequence is generally good – her website contains a few weak images which could be trimmed and a fair amount of mundane ones that I would NOT remove since they lend the mysterious and amazing images an air of possibility.

These ones that are more snapshot-ish I appreciate in the context of the rest of her work. It makes me feel like I could walk down a small path or street and see the wall of a nearby building shimmer and blow away.

There are a few galleries on her site that I don’t particularly care for but that’s the case with almost every artist.  The images I often see featured are the more predictable ones, the ones that remind me of many other young artists and art school stereotypes – even when masterfully done. (I love pus-eye, for example, but I feel like the edit here takes her work to some lesser level.) Some of them just seem too damned hip (a viewpoint that quite possibly cements me as a crotchety old man at the ripe age of 23.) There are other complete series that don’t seem to stand up to the other work, though this may be my fault for jumping around the site too much while curating in my mind. Some of these could easily be summed up by the one best image without losing much of the impact, and perhaps gaining more mystery:

I guess, as with anyone’s work, it’s a battle of context – more context, less context – and how the viewer reacts to it. One of the things I love about the internet (and publications with loose photos) is the ability for me to take an artist I love and remix them. (As a side note, if she had a flash site, I wouldn’t bother – and there are many artists who lose out on good blog press in this manner.) I’d love to sit with a pile of her small prints for a couple weeks and make a book edit. The quick edit I’ve done for this post really doesn’t do the possibilities found within her archive justice.

There is serious serious talent here and an eye for something close to what Josh (and many others) calls The New Mysticism. I find myself reminded of an old comic book series – possibly losing my critic-cred – I liked called Books of Magic: dark, sometimes scary, but about a kid and with a sense of innocence central to it. It’s that aspect of youth that draws me. Not the lithe cavorting of visually aware youth, but the feeling in the forest that alive means something, and perhaps the stick in your hand is not just a stick.

I think that I might be (subtly or secretly) dissapointed with Hannah’s bound photobook due to her current choices in sequencing and editing, but I’m ecstatic about her work (in general) after viewing her website. I encourage you to check it out yourself. I’ll bet you a dollar you’ll have different favorites, but I’m absolutely sure you will have some.